Middle school students from Plano and Richardson were out of the classroom Monday, learning what's possible when anything is possible.
They were at the Perot Museum in Dallas for "Introduce A Girl to Engineering Day."
"It's so important to get them at this age and encourage them to let them know they need to keep pushing through," said Kani Udoh, a chemical engineer at ExxonMobil. As an African American woman, Udoh said she didn't have role models she could identify with when she was a child. "They're not seeing people that look like them as engineers. They're not thinking of themselves as engineers."
The girls worked in teams to build bridges out of cardboard, sticks, and tape. They also built catapults out of Legos. ExxonMobil employees and engineers, most of them women, helped mentor students on their projects.
"There's always been this thing in the world where women can't do as good as men can, and that kind of ties into our brain set because we've been hearing that since we were girls," explained Hannah Simpson, an 8th grader from Carpenter Middle School in Plano. "It's kinda like, well, I can't do this, or that's a man's job, I'm not supposed to get my hands dirty...I think that's trash! I don't agree with that."
According to the National Science Foundation, women account for less than 15 percent of practicing engineers. African American and Hispanics account for just 12 percent of the engineering workforce.
"I tell you that all of can be engineers," Udoh told the girls. "You can change the world and you can do a lot of great things if you stick with it."
